Drawing out the reality of war

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Betty Churcher ... it is the war art drawn from disgust that she finds most moving.Photo: James Davies JGD

Betty Churcher's history of Australian war art is a very personal affair, writes Lauren Martin.

Betty Churcher first saw the art of war as a child, in a Charles Bean book of Gallipoli soldiers' sketches that lay mainly unopened on the coffee table of her Brisbane home.

Lately the ever-elegant former director of the National Gallery of Australia has been making her own record of war art, part history and part art history.

Inspired when her son, the painter Peter Churcher, was appointed an official artist for the war against terrorism in 2002, Betty Churcher's forthcoming book is dedicated to her father, William Dewar Cameron, a one-time bombardier who refused ever to look at that Bean book, or say what he saw in Ypres and Bullecourt in World War I. In producing The Art of War, Churcher was losing her own sight, with a melanoma in one eye.

"My father never discussed the war," reads Churcher's opening. "Everything about the First World War turned out to be repugnant to him, yet there could have been no more ardent young recruit."

The army was very picky about who it selected as soldiers. You had to be tall and strong, and you had to have perfect teeth. "Dad took all his teeth out, because they rejected him at first," Churcher says over lunch. "He had a few fillings that needed to be done, [but] he just wanted to be accepted immediately. So he went off to the dentist and said, 'Remove the lot,' and turned up at the recruiting office with false teeth and bleeding gums. And they accepted him."

It was, Churcher writes, a rash decision that her naturally fastidious father was to regret for the rest of his life.

Churcher cites a theory of artist Jan Senbergs, who she interviewed for the book, that the people who talk the most are those that have done the least. "Those who had the worst experience tend to just try to draw a curtain on those years of their lives," she says. "Anyway, Dad was one of those."

As a child, Churcher was intrigued by the war. "I used to beg him to talk about it, because it was an adventure as far as I was concerned. All he would say was: 'Betty, you had to have been there. It's no good my talking about it because you would never be able to understand."'

She writes that "everything about trench warfare repelled him - the unremitting brutality, the sickening smell of rotting corpses and dysentery, and the dull, heavy pull of mud." He was caught in a gas attack on August 25, 1917, and discharged, medically unfit, the next year.

"Dad would never go on Anzac marches," Churcher says. "He wouldn't even accept the TPI pension - that's totally and permanently incapacitated - until a doctor insisted, for his wife's sake.

"That First World War was really more horrible than we can imagine and yet there are no real records of it," she says, after mining even the tiny sketchbooks soldiers kept in their pockets as they leapt ashore at Anzac Cove. "None of the artists showed the real horrors as they did in the Second World War."

In the latter war, a just cause could easily be found in opposing Nazism; the former did not have the same clarity of motive. "But we, as loyal sons and daughters of the British Empire, leapt to her defence. It was as naive as that. Even amongst the artists."

Except for Will Dyson, an Australian by then well established as a cartoonist for London's Daily Mirror. He applied to go to the front as a civilian five months before any official Australian war artist scheme was established.

Twice wounded, Dyson never carried a rifle. His sympathies, Churcher writes, extended to "not just Australian soldiers but also those who were fighting on the other side. He drew exhausted and shockingly wounded German soldiers walking without escort into the Allied trenches at Ypres to give themselves up - no loathing or rancour here.

"Sardonically, he called his drawing Wine of Victory. He said: 'I'll never draw a line to show war except as the filthy business it is.' "

It is these sentiments that make Churcher's most passionate passages in The Art of War, though in the chapters on World War I she pays tribute to the acclaimed paintings of Will Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and particularly George Lambert. Lambert was a fine horseman, and Churcher recounts his battlefield trips and reveals his art with equal insight.

She tells how Lambert painted a small oil study on the spot, on the lid of a cigar box. She details his precision, painting Anzac, the Landing 1915 with the flat light of dawn rather than taking artistic licence, how he posed his oldest son in uniform, piling up chairs for him to scramble over in the London studio to simulate the angle of the slope. Churcher says Lambert leapt his horse across the empty trenches, just to see if he could do it, in his study for The Charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba, 1917.

He was the right man for the job, Churcher says; and in moving seamlessly from vivid battle accounts to an explanation how Lambert's work influenced the course of Australian art, Churcher proves she is the right woman for the job of The Art of War.

Yet it is the art drawn from deepest disgust that most moves Churcher. Notably, works by Bernard Slawik, who came to Australia in 1948 to work as an architect in Victoria, after being in a concentration camp in Poland. "I was stunned when I first saw his passionate small drawings," she writes. "I felt I was seeing the origins of expressionism."

These drawings - on tiny, torn scraps of paper filched from the drafting office where Slawik was assigned to work - were hidden under a floor tile. "To draw was to die," Churcher explains. "Any verbal or visual record was cause for immediate execution."

One day Slawik saw his drawings had been exposed and, assuming he had been discovered, he decided to risk escape - feeling he had nothing to lose. "It was midwinter, snowing heavily and already dark when he made his run for freedom, Churcher writes. "Resourcefully he buried himself and his drawings deep in a snowdrift, which served both as a subterranean hideaway and as insulation against the cold. He managed to hold out for three days - until his scent had worn away and sniffer dogs had been called off."

Those drawings that changed Slawik's life, made in the grip of an anger so overpowering that his lead pencil in places nearly tore through the paper, he then hid away again. Never spoke of them. When he died in 1991, his widow, Alma, found them and immediately recognised what they were. She too had been in a camp.

"I found that very moving," Churcher says, "that he could do these ... and then not wish to show them to anyone, but not wish to lose them because they were such an important chapter of his life.

"I immediately, of course, thought of Dad, lips tightly sealed ... he went to his grave without ever telling me what went on in the trenches of Yypes.

"[Slawik was] acting out on bits of paper his own emotions, for himself, as a way almost of exorcising what he was going through, and I thought ... if Dad had a scrap of paper and a pencil, and the ability, perhaps he could have ... got it out of his system."

Churcher's book and an accompanying SBS television series range widely across Australian artists and the conflicts they covered; she is mindful that as a small country Australia doesn't always make the war histories. She is lucid on the women artists - including Stella Bowen, Nora Heysen and Wendy Sharpe - and puts their war experience in the context of their wider artistic careers. She moves from Gallipoli to East Timor, and finally to Gordon Bennett's Notes to Basquiat (Pink) (2002), a vast work responding to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre.

Churcher's book nearly ends where it began, with her son and his calm portraits from HMAS Kanimbla. When Peter Churcher was approached by the Australian War Memorial, his mother's first reaction was: "I wonder what Dad would think of this?"

He is long dead, but Churcher imagines her father would have viewed his grandson's appointment with interest. "Not if he'd been going as a soldier - I think he'd have been upset by that. But to go to record, I think he would have thought: well, it's a good idea, to record."

Unlike that Bean book, Betty Churcher's own clear-sighted record of war art, you imagine, is a book her father would have opened, and appreciated.

The Art of War (Melbourne University Press, $39.95) will be available in bookshops from October 11.